Fabricating Tech: Pleasure and Pain of Design Communities

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Talk Format

Abstract

In this moment of Maker Fairs and Etsy, much has been made of communities trying their hands at fabrication, whether programming code or creating blouses, whether bending circuits or looping stitches. However, despite the overlap in the participants in these communities (the same people who are learning to stitch are also learning to program in python), radically different social spaces have emerged. This panel examines the pleasure and pain of entering into these spaces through socialization and the acquisition of new schools of practice, along with the differences in standards of acceptance, support, and mentoring that are fostered here. We examine participation in these maker spaces as potentially transgressive and transformative environs that can become consumed by abusive normative discourse, epitomized, for example, by the acculturation of the new members. We are interested in how this moment of making, particularly critical making, has been shaped by the online and in-person communities that have co-evolved with it. We also investigate coding and fabricating practices as spaces suitable for hacking (i.e., for subversive counterpractices), while mindful of the limitations and frustrations that can be imposed by lived realities. At the center of our investigation is the moment of making and the ways that this performance of technical knowledge can place the maker into a relationship with a social milieu with respect to individual agency and gender, racial, economic, and even sexual identity. The media of making become the modes of discourse, whereby individuals perform their identity vis-a-vis their work’s relationship to traditional cultural practices.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Richard Lemarchand, University of Southern California (CA)

Individual Presentations

• The Anxiety of Amateurism and the Pleasures of Programming in Fashioning Circuits - Kim Brillante Knight, University of Texas Dallas (TX)

• Spaghetti Code and Stellar Stitches : Examining Shame and Praise in Two Cultures of Making - Mark C. Marino, University of Southern California (CA)

• Reclaiming fabrication one (utopian?) stitch at a time. - Lone K. Hansen, Aarhus University (Denmark)

Comment

• Richard Lemarchand, University of Southern California (CA)